Windows Disk Defragmenter Utility let you “re-organize” the used spaces of your hard drives. You can think of your hard drive as a drawer with full of stuffs that you just dump in again and again. The problem is, when you need to find something from that drawer, you might need to spend a good amount of time to search through the mess. Same for the Windows operating system, your hard drive is the messy drawer, and Windows just has to search through it to execute your command. So it’s time to re-organize it to make your PC run faster.

The defragmentation process might take a very long time, depending on the usage size of your hard drive. To clean up your PC and to speed up the defragmentation process, it is recommended to do a drive cleanup prior to the defragmentation.

Most likely, operating and application files are stored in your “C drive”, but it doesn’t hurt to do a cleanup + defragmentation on all of your hard drives every once in awhile.

Use this trick at your own risks

  1. Launch the Disk Defragmenter utility by either:
    - “Start” >> “Programs” >> “Accessories” >> “System Tools” >> “Disk Defragmenter“, or:
    - “Start” >> “Run“, enter “dfrg.msc” then press Enter.
  2. Select the disk you want to perform defragmentation (i.e. “Local Disk C”) and click “Defragment“:

  3. Windows starts to defragment your selected hard drive as follow:

  4. This process might take awhile depending on the size and usage of your hard drive. During this process, your computer might be running slow. Fortunately, you can always pause and resume the process if you want to use other applications on your PC at a normal speed.